Lake Carnegie
Married people generally come to
know each other very well, and when you have been married to someone for
fifty-three years, you may be surprised to learn there are still
surprises. This Monday past, Labor Day,
was spectacularly beautiful—the third and best-yet day of the long holiday
weekend. For most of us, I think, Labor
Day has few industrial associations. It
is, instead, a punctuation point, an end of something and a beginning of
another. To judge from the commercial
advertisements in the papers the national theme is “Back to School!” But we
have graduated. I no longer go back to
the lecture hall in September, nor have we had school children living with us
for the last couple of decades.
Thus I was rather surprised when my
wife said to me over coffee: “We need to mark Labor Day.” Surprise turned to amazement when she specified
the proposed mode of its marking. “How
would you like to get the canoe and go out on the lake?” Within twenty minutes we were dragging the
canoe from its happy home in a bamboo patch at the bottom of the yard and
lifting it into the bed of the pickup.
The canoe is sixteen feet long, the truck bed with its tailgate
extension, ten. So with some rudimentary
tie-downs and with gravity working slightly in our favor, we gingerly drove the
scant half-mile to the launching dock without encountering another vehicle on
the road.
It was by now perhaps nine o’clock. The lake was calm and beautiful, and there
was still a hint of cool in the barely perceptible morning breeze. If I had started out thinking “Why am I doing
this?” the thought soon turned to “Why don’t I do this every day?” While we were unloading a second pickup
arrived—a grizzle-bearded guy with a kayak, looking as much like a mountain man
as it is possible to do in suburban New Jersey.
There were a few people on the lake, two or three pairs of fishermen who
had sacrificed any claim to moral seriousness with their huge Evanrude
outboards. But mainly, to the east, in
the direction of the now well risen sun, the narrow lake lay flat and empty as
far as the eye could see. So we set off
east toward the Harrison Street bridge and the long stretch of elegant lakeside
homes beyond it.
I will say little about our joint
skills of navigation and oarsmanship, except that their inadequacies provided ample
material for marital recrimination. Ornithology
is probably a safer topic. There are
splendid waterfowl on Lake Carnegie, and their numbers seem to be
increasing. There is an islet with a
large dead tree that sometimes has several white egrets like Christmas
decorations. There were ducks of several
genres, known to us and unknown. There was a floating flock of cormorants,
spaced out in a curving line with the precision of Nelson’s fleet at the Battle
of the Nile. There were many herons—flying
low across the water or perched amid the snags of dead trees fallen at the
water’s edge. Poets seek in vain for the
right adjective for the heron—“wise,” “stately,” “hieratic”—none of them just
right, but I can do no better.
We paddled about a mile in the
direction of Kingston, admiring some of the Lakeside Drive properties to port
side. I had noticed from driving along
the road that one of the most lavish of these is for sale, and was amused now
to see a “For Sale” notice facing the lake at the water’s edge. On reflection I suppose that anyone capable
of buying it is as likely to approach by yacht as by car. At length, probably a mile from our starting
place, we arrived off the rickety dock of our friends Giles and Diana. Indeed Giles was in sight, laboring in his
back garden on Labor Day. This had not
been planned, but seize the day! We
shouted to him. He blinked in
amazement. We tethered our canoe and
crawled out on hands and knees onto the splintery planks. It was a piratical caper, a home invasion by
canoe.
We invited ourselves to coffee,
which we took in the front garden, where Diana had been doing her laboring. Amidst the jollity, spontaneity conquered
all. We agreed on the spot that we must get together again soon,
indeed about five o’clock that same afternoon at our house, for a communal
meal. The early hour was chosen to
accommodate Diana’s tennis mania. Her
belief was that Roger Federer and John Isner were to begin a crucial duel in
the US Open at seven.
The meal
was delicious, with an adventurous if grab-bag menu. We began with a small primo of pesto Genovese.
Diana had some hamburgers, and we grilled them—to satisfy my spiritual
need for a “Labor Day Cookout”. Then
there was a huge ratatouille. (Have I mentioned that we have a large
harvest of tomatoes and zucchini?)
Eschewing the air-conditioned house, we sat outside in the quite warm
air of late afternoon, ate delicious food, and talked the talk of friends. Conversation ranged widely, though one
recurrent theme was the English West country, which our friends had recently
visited. It was the perfect Labor Day, and all the result of Joan’s surprising initiative. As Enobarbus once remarked of Cleopatra, Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her
infinite variety. A canoe, after
all, has its similarities to a royal Egyptian barge.
